Somewhere in the snow. Drowned in the fog. Surrounded by trees all over, deep in the forest, obscured from daylight.
In contemplation...

Monday, October 16, 2006

The Other Side of Graffiti (fiction)

Artists like me, I believe, are the ones truly meant to influence people by expressing what’s on their minds. Therefore, I am an artist who has produced some wonderful conceptual works but in one way or another, there was no way they would be accepted at a gallery or any kind of public exhibition.The idea of putting it on the Internet appealed to me. Yet, it was somehow not meant to be displayed on a web page; oh no… there were other ways certainly, other tunnels to dig through, other places to upturn, other people to be discovered.This situation was rather familiar to me. I had thought about it in the past. Now it was truly happening to me. I was desperately choking on my own vomit made of my determination to do something I always wanted to do.On the bus, it is the same smell of my constant, internal contemplation. I look through the window and I can’t help but notice the gruesome state of building walls. Ugly, pointless graffiti all over them.I look at a van. The familiar Ford Transit. Guess what? A simplistically drawn penis across its uniformly white side. A work of brainless, social benefits-sucking, little bastards… and I thank them for that.At this very instant of the mundane bus journey I was stuck in, I had a light-bulb style idea. Graffiti & my art. An obscure, winding pathway between the two has been opened.

Of course, it had to be done all at night when the area was deserted. A careful planning scheme would ensure success and so I made sketches of exactly what I should graffiti. Virtually exact replicas of some of my artworks were to be carefully applied to building walls and other ‘ugly’ empty spaces.The audience I would reach would be countless.Finally, my profoundly inspired works of art were to be immortalised.The actual process was dauntingly challenging and there were lots of annoying obstacles like the dreaded CCTV cameras as well as some junkies late at night.

After the first few nights of my Messiah-like work, nothing really changed. By day, I was still the same daydreaming schoolboy.I am not going to describe my artworks simply because it would take me too much time and anyway visual art is to be observed and interpreted by the viewer without the contemplative opinion of the artist himself.It would generally be attributed to the genre of realism but with a certain underlying idea which concerned every possible aspect of society.As time passed, my skill increased and so did the number of artworks per night. But you might be thinking, of course, why am I doing this?

The fact that I made it in the news means a big, bulky zero to me. I felt I needed to do something important, significant, influential… something which contrasts the dull and unfair daily reality. You see, I’ve been wanting this since I was a little kid who I guess just lacked the true passion of it all. Opportunities come and go and even more heart-breakingly, so do ideas.Now, it’s different. I am not a rebel and there is nothing violent about this. It is simply a need, a necessity. All about overcoming the everyday struggle of finding who you really are and finally getting in actual physical touch with who you want to be. But it is also more than that.It’s the fulfilling sense of expressing yourself that lies at the heart of this little adventure.With these artworks, I am simply trying to open people’s eyes to pretty much everything. Art, modern life, the future… an exhibition of something which is purely truthful and is unquestionably able to change your perspective of it all.

However, my aim is far from actually changing people. This is in the scope of universal deception that lies in the heart of such ambitions.No, I only want to make more people aware of some things and spark some thoughts in their heads, not just in mine. This is a task which can only be accomplished with the invaluable help of some controversy.

I suppose I should have anticipated some of the events that followed.Within a few weeks of my adventure, I discovered some new graffiti artworks on the street. In style, they resembled my works but in fact, they weren’t mine at all.

It couldn’t be anything else and I knew it. Other artists were now doing this. “Ripping off” my methods and coming up with a great deal of conceptual art. Basically, I had “followers”. Since the newspapers had pictures of my artworks all over them, it was a matter of time before my work gathered popularity among the general as well as ‘artistic’ public.I decided to stop my work. However, hundreds of artworks were now appearing everyday all over the country.All my life prior to my adventure, I had been suppressed entirely by myself as all the things in life penetrated my heart so deeply and instead of reflecting back outside, they scattered all over my insides, hitting me harder and harder.Well now, society is directly suppressing me, psychologically. Getting caught and condemned simply for expressing my mind was again, a matter of time.My hobby/destiny only lasted a couple of weeks at the cost of countless sleepless nights and of course, a criminal record.The significant consequence was however, far grander than I could’ve imagined. For the first time in my life, my work actually meant something to people other than myself.I had sparked a vigorously burning art revolution.All over the globe, “conceptual graffiti” was the new breakthrough hit.The new path for intellectual freedom. A huge injection of adrenaline into artistic development. A much needed one.

1 Comments:

if your work is as good as the way you sound when you right about it, i'd much appreciate it if i was to have a look at it and prob interview you. i'm a year 3 undergraduate student and i'm doing my dessertation on Graffiti.

i'd really like to hear from you. Melissamy email add is:simplydabest86@hotmail.comhope you'll have time for me as your work sound very inspiring and would like to hear more. many thanks

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About Me

‘What can I say? I’ve known him for one and a half years: he’s a morose sort of chap – gloomy, stand-offish and proud; recently (and for all I know not so recently, as well) he’s been over anxious, with a tendency to hypochondria. But sometimes it’s not hypochondria at all that he’s suffering from, he’s simply cold and unfeeling to the point of inhumanity, it’s really just as though there were two opposites alternating within him. He is sometimes unconscionably short on conversation! It’s all: “I’ve no time, stop bothering me”, yet he just lies there not doing anything. He doesn’t mock, yet it’s not because he doesn’t have enough wit, but rather as though he didn’t have enough time for such trivial matters. He doesn’t listen to what people say to say to him. He’s never interested in what everyone else is interested in at any given moment. He has fearfully high opinion of himself, and perhaps not entirely without justification.
Well, what else?...I think your arrival will have a most salutary effect on him.’
Fyodor Dostoevsky